This chapter explores the transition from the politics of identity to what we define as ’the unfinished politics of race’. It moves on from the substantive accounts of specific types of mobilisations to the broader transformations that characterise the current conjuncture, in which we see a continually shifting relationship between counter publics and alternative public spheres on the one hand and the mainstream institutions of society on the other. An important theme in the chapter is an account of the changing political debates on race and multiculturalism in both the Conservative and Labour Parties. This includes a critical analysis of the arguments put forward under the labels of Red Tory and Blue Labour. We argue that these arguments, although they cover a wide range of social and political issues, have been deeply inflected by continual preoccupations about the articulation of a new form of identity politics framed by concerns about race, immigration, and the positioning of whiteness in the current period.

In this chapter, we consider the ways in which these normative framings structure both policy interventions but also ways of thinking about the multicultural nature of contemporary Britain. The work of the Blair Government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion is considered where one of the authors served as a commissioner between 2006 and 2008. The notions of integration and cohesion are considered for the ways in which they, at times, fail to provide a particularly helpful frame for understanding the dynamics of social change, the diachronic rather than synchronic evolution of racialised politics in the United Kingdom, the highly localised restructuring of economy and society that structure the crucibles out of which new diversities emerge.

This chapter outlines the historical background to the present by analysing the transition from empire to multicultural democracy that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. It situates the post-1945 history of race and immigration within a broader frame that includes both the role of race in the wider context and deeper history of the British Empire as well as the national and local experiences of race within the ‘mother country’ over a much longer history. We argue in this chapter that it is simplistic to see the postcolonial period as one that saw the move from empire to multicultural democracy. Rather, we suggest that it is important to provide a conceptual and empirical frame that highlights the ways in which processes of racialisation and exclusion helped to fashion a particular politics around race in British society whose consequences remain with us today. And so, we also outline the conceptual frame that we use in the book to explore the changing spheres of political incorporation that have shaped the position of minorities in British society.

This chapter considers the growth of what we characterise as a transitional public sphere that bridged the private domains of individual struggles against racial attacks, racist practice, and far-right politics with the public domain of mainstream politics. Struggles against racism have often shared an ongoing ambivalence about the imperative to raise profile and move from the margins to the centre of political debate. The need for political autonomy and agency sits, at times, in tension, with the need to build broad alliances and political efficacy. Campaigns demand profile but are always liable to charges of co-optation. The struggle for unity over racial dilemmas sits alongside recognition of the pluralities of intersectional struggles in gender, class, sexuality, diverse ethnicities, and religious faith that at times cross over with linked considerations of legal status of migrants and refugees. In this context, the emergence of a transitional public sphere of antiracism in the 1980s and 1990s is considered through a detailed analysis of this sphere of political action.

This chapter concludes the book by shifting the analysis to three sets of interlinked conversations that seem to frame the current debates about race and migration. We begin by analysing the impact of the ongoing conversation about the position of the United Kingdom within the European Union that led to the decision in the 2016 Referendum to support a strategy of leaving the Union and taking back control of national borders. As several commentators have argued in recent years, the impact of the debates around Brexit is likely to be felt in the coming decade or so as their impact on influencing and shaping both current and future agendas about race and racism become more evident. We then move on to explore the implications of continual efforts to develop and maintain a hostile environment around questions of immigration and belonging to assert control over borders and create a social basis for integrated communities. The final part of this chapter allows us to engage critically with the attempt by some commentators to distinguish racism from those forms of identity that are defined in terms of national citizen preference and racial self-interest.

This chapter explores the growing significance of religious affiliation in shaping the identity politics of racialised minorities. Specifically, the chapter addresses the growing significance of Islam in shaping both the public reaction to religious diversity and how the identity politics of Islamic faith reshaped a very different alternative public sphere. The chapter addresses how intersectionalities of diaspora, race, faith, gender, and geopolitics land in place, in the specific history of the East End of London. The chapter describes how diasporic Bangladeshi politics emerges in a transactional relationship with the local state in the East End. But what it means to be British and Bangladeshi, or white and ‘East Ender’, is subject to significant change at the same time. Racialisation and religion combine to shape both white and British Bangladeshi collective identities in nuanced ways. The chapter argues that what was commonly represented as isolation or withdrawal from the mainstream of political participation by a certain fraction of some minority Bangladeshi demographics was nothing of the sort.

This chapter focuses on struggles to dwell in the city that characterised a strand of both racist practice and responses to it. From attempts to purchase collectively housing to the rarely told stories of organised squatting and the emergence of the black housing movement, the forces of racist exclusion produced a Newtonian response; collective endeavours to claim the right to find somewhere to live in the cities of post-war Britain. These social movements racialised both the claim to dwell in the city and the challenges to patterns of discrimination. But the struggles which emerged from the grassroots and grew over the 1970s and 1980s also in some ways ran their course over time for reasons that are also considered in this chapter.